It is tremendously slow going.
The adrenaline surges through me.
I can't breathe.
I pause, gasping. My head pounds.
I double over, pressing my arms over my belly. There's an ache unfurling there, but I've got to ignore it.
It's just a stitch in my side, so...
God.
I fall to my knees, curling as tightly inward as I can.
Agony, piercing, electric.
Something sharp is being shoved into my stomach.
I'm being stabbed.
I scrabble my hands at my belly in terror. I move aside the coat, lift my up my blouse and sweater.
Pale, soft skin.
No wound.
I pant as I crouch on the ground, as I feel the pain ravage my middle.
I stare at the unmarked skin.
There's nothing there.
There's nothing.
I rise to my feet. I groan out, doubling over, before I can get up the strength to fully rise.
But I have to get up the strength.
I have to.
The wolves are howling again.
They sound so...triumphant.
I should love that sound.
But I don't.
I hate it.
I hate it with all that I am.
I move through the snow. Each step, lifting my leg through the drifts, is a special form of torture. My stomach muscles move and contract as they normally would, but it's accompanied by a pain too much to bear.
But I've got to bear it.
For Silver.
The howl is persistent.
Constant.
Close.
A shadow rises before me, and I put my hand out just in time. My palm thuds dully against the metal.
A wall.
A building.
I turn, and I slide down the little drift until I'm between the snow and the wall. Here, there's not much snow at all.
I can run here.
Even with the pain, I can run, and so I do, trailing a hand along the corrugated metal.
Running, hoping, praying, please, please, please...
And then it's there.
A sliding barn door.
And it is open.
I curl my shoulders against the wind, press my body through the small opening.
I stifle a groan, falling to my knees as the pain rakes through my body once more.
But then, I hear it.
I look up.
And the nightmare becomes real.
Chapter 24: What Love Can Do
I found Silver.
And I wish I hadn't.
I stare at the scene in front of me. My brain is trying to make some nice, logical sense out of what it's seeing. It's trying to tell me that the nightmare before me couldn't possibly be real. Because it's too horrific. It's something conjured up out of my deepest, darkest fears and it's not real, because it'd be impossible for something so horrific to actually be happening...
But I smell the blood in the air.
I taste the heated anger.
I can see what's right in front of me.
It's real.
Silver is on her knees in the center of a circle of people. Her hands are bound tightly behind her back with rusted chains, the chains looped around her front, too. It's a tangle of corroding metal, but it's keeping her contained.
Her face is swollen. One black eye. Blood trickles out of the corner of her mouth.
But she stares defiantly at who's before her.
Marie.
My grandmother.
She's standing, feet hip-width apart, arms crossed in front of her, a sour expression encapsulated in a sneering frown.
She stares down at Silver with pure hatred.
My stomach turns inside of me.
“This,” Marie snaps, gesturing to Silver with an impatient swipe, “was not the point. She needs to be dead before we go get Ella. Don't you understand? I'm not going to have this messed up again.” She steps forward, snarling. “Get it done.”
“But...but, Ms. Rivers, it's not so easy as that. She keeps healing,” mutters a woman, stepping forward, head bowed meekly. It's the same woman who came with Silver down the hill when we were at the stream. “We stick the knife in...she heals, it just keeps happening over and over...”
My grandmother snarls again, but this time it's wordless.
She steps forward, and she snatches something from this woman's hand.
It glitters in the one florescent bulb overhead as Marie turns.
My breath hitches in my throat.
A knife.
It's bloody, slick, glistening in the light like a ruby...
“No!” I'm shouting, and I'm rising at the exact same time that my grandmother crouches smoothly next to Silver.
Marie looks up in surprise, and then her eyes widen as she stares at me, mouth open, the brandished knife in her hand.
“Ella!” Silver growls. She's shaking her head, groaning, hunching forward. “Please go...they're going to...to kill you...” she shouts out...
At the exact same time that my grandmother smiles.
It's such an ugly smile.
In this, there's nothing of my mother.
And there's nothing of me either
But I don't have long to think that. I don't have long to think about anything.
Because my grandmother palms the knife in her right hand. She reaches out with her left, and curls her fingers cruelly, digging her nails into Silver's shoulder.
She moves, lightning fast, darting the knife back...
And then forward.
She buries the knife blade in Silver's stomach.
A scream is ripped from me.
I scream because of what I'm seeing, the knife deep in Silver.
And I scream because of the agony that blossoms in my own gut.
I stare at Silver. I'm panting, clutching my stomach, but I can see clearly, right in front of me, maybe twenty feet away...
It's Silver who's been stabbed.
Not me.
Silver.
My Silver.
Marie stabbed her, shoved the knife into her stomach like she was slicing bread. Malicious glee is evident in every line of her as she grips the pommel of the knife that sticks out of my lover's stomach.
I scream again.
But this isn't a scream of pain.
No...
It sounds more like a roar.
Or...
A howl.
I'm standing. The muscles in my torso fire off electric bursts of agony, and I ignore them, taking one step forward and another.
My grandmother doesn't move.
Rather, she gazes at me with something akin to disgust.
“It's time,” she says, voice clipped.
And then, smile deepening, she gazes at Silver.
And she shoves the knife into Silver's stomach a little deeper, grinding it in with the heel of her hand.
I groan, dropping to my knees.
For Silver's part, sweat leaks down from her temples, her neck slick, her shoulders glistening in the florescent light. She's shaking.
But she does not make a sound.
My grandmother stands, leaving the knife where it rests.
Marie gazes down almost absentmindedly at her one hand. It's coated in blood, shining in the light. She sighs, rubs it down the thigh of her jeans.
“Get it done,” she says, nodding to the group of people surrounding her.
As one, they turn to look at me. Dozens of eyes pin me to the spot with varying degrees of loathing.
I take a deep breath.
I curl my one hand into a fist.
I've never been in a fight before in my life. The closest I've ever come is one time in preschool, a boy shoved me to the ground.
That...doesn't help anything.
And, my God, there are at least twenty people.
No one could win against these odds. Certainly not someone who has no
idea what she's doing. Someone who's never fought, ever.
I stand straight, lift my chin.
It doesn't matter.
I'm going to die.
And this is how it's going to end.
So, no, none of that matters.
What matters is Silver.
I walk forward, limping, because my stomach contracts in agony, and placing one foot in front of the other is a special kind of hell. Each step is torment, but I make it anyway.
And the assembled people watch me, bemused.
But they make no move toward me.
My grandmother has taken a phone out of her back jeans pocket and is growling angrily into it about something. Her back is to me now, and she's far enough away that she's not going to turn and close the distance between us in a second.
I reach Silver.
I actually reach her. No one bothers to stop me. Maybe this is fun to them, watching the last moments of two people they're about to kill...I don't know.
But I reach her.
I crumple to my knees, threading my fingers beneath the hateful chains around her arms.
I hiss out, drawing my fingers back. They feel like they're burning.
“Don't touch it,” Silver mumbles, bending forward. Sweat trickles down between her shoulder blades. “It'll hurt you.”
“Christ...what's...what's happening?” I ask her, and then I shake my head, reach out, because it doesn't matter. Nothing matters.
Nothing but her.
My hands tenderly caress her face, my palms settling against the curves of her jaw.
I lift her head gently so that her eyes can meet mine.
But they can't.
She has them closed, her brow furrowed.
Pain is evident in every line of her.
Her face is built of agony.
“I'm sorry...” she whispers with swollen lips, and then she says it again, the agony growing more pronounced: “I'm so sorry. I'm the one who brought you here. I should have known. Ella, I'm...sorry.”
“No,” I tell her, and then I growl it out again, louder. “No.”
It's then that my grandmother turns to look at me, the phone pressed to her ear, her brows up. Her expression vacillates from peak annoyance to intense loathing.
“Why isn't she dead yet?” she snaps, gesturing to me. “Do it now,” she growls, “I don't have time for this.”
The assembled people cast glances among themselves. They shift their weight from foot to foot. Tension rises in the air, tight and humming with what's to come.
There's no time to prepare...and how could I even brace for this? I turn, and I make sure Silver is behind me. I'm crouching on the ground, still doubled over in pain, but at least I'm between her and them.
If this is the last action I do, then I'm okay with that.
One person moves forward, breaking away from the others. Her long legs, out of the corner of my eye, remind me of a spider.
I start as I look up at her.
Her eyes are dark, her skin pale, translucent. She has long, shiny black hair and looks very pretty.
Too pretty.
That's something I see in an instant, though, because I have to concentrate on the part that stands out.
Her teeth are diamond white, brilliant in the somewhat dark warehouse...
And they're easy to see.
Because her incisors are long.
Much too long.
She looks exactly like a...
“Vampire?” I whisper.
And then I glance at my grandmother who's still staring at me, her lips pursed, as if I'm a mere annoyance.
I look around at the other assembled people, and I notice that a lot of them have the fang thing in common.
I put everything together in my head, my brain firing quickly, and then I say:
“You... You did this?”
This encompasses so much. From the very first moment in the gas station, realizing that I was in danger. As vampires hunted me because they wanted my heart, my life devolved until it became a still, simple point: staying alive.
All of this...
Because of her?
But that all fades away and pales as I realize the true beginning of all of this.
Oh, God.
I stare at my grandmother.
My grandmother.
And then, my throat tightening, I ask: “did you...did you kill my mother?”
The words fade away into the emptiness of the room before Marie takes the phone away from her ear.
She ends the call, slides it into her front pocket.
She shrugs languidly.
“Oh, no, dear,” she tells me, her head to the side, her smile wide. “I don't have time for such things. He did it.”
And she gestures to a small group of men, off to the side.
I can't tell which one she's pointing to.
But does it matter?
“On orders from you...” I murmur, and since the room is so quiet, even with the storm raging outside...
Marie hears it.
Her smile widens.
And she simply nods.
There is no way for me to fully comprehend what just happened, no way for it to fully sink into my bones and understand it...
Because it's nothing something that could be understood.
A mother had her daughter killed.
Murdered.
“But...” I splutter, shake my head, grit my teeth together. My entire body wants to contract with sobs, feel the grief and keenly through every bit of bone and blood.
But there's no time for that.
And, since there's no time for much of anything, at the very least I need to know.
I snarl: “why?”
Marie spreads her hands, give another noncommittal shrug. “Why not? I needed the heart lock, and Anna was anything but cooperative. So I took matters into my own hands. The humans of the world aren't worth their salt. They're lazy, pathetic excuses of life. Werewolves, vampires...we are clearly the superior species. Why should we bend the neck to trash?”
I wince at the venom in her words. I glance back at Silver, whose eyes are still tightly closed. Her lashes flutter against her paling cheeks.
Waves of grief flood me, over and over, my pain at losing my mother roars up in me again.
And now...
Now, I'm going to lose so much more.
For half a heartbeat, I am consumed by hopelessness. It floods me with my grief, and swallows me down into the dark.
My mother is dead.
I, too, am about to be killed.
Silver lies dying at my feet.
The piercing sadness that has resided inside of me since the moment of my mother's passing was a fire...and that fire is now fed, destroying all of me.
I sink to my knees again, crumpling forward. I put my arms about Silver, and I don't care that the chains burn against me. I don't care that the pain in my belly grows larger and larger, until all I am is pain.
It's over.
All of this is over.
And there's nothing I can do about it.
“I'm sorry,” Silver whispers against me. She's curling forward around the knife in her belly. The stream of blood leaking from the side of her mouth hasn't stopped...it's only grown thicker, faster. She coughs, and when I pull away a little to look at her...
That's when she opens her eyes.
There is no light there now.
Her eyes are dark. Fading. Still bright blue, but what makes Silver...Silver: it's being lost.
“I'm sorry,” Silver groans again, a pain-filled litany.
She slowly leans forward until her upper body is in my lap. I cradle her, rocking, sobbing without sound.
She takes one last, deep breath, and I lower my face to hers, as she says something else.
Her voice is low, almost impossible to hear...
But I hear it.
She whispers: “I love you.”
My world implodes, narrowing down from everyth
ing to one still, small point:
Silver.
Her great heart beats slowly in her chest.
Her blood pulses out of her body.
There's no question: I know she had nothing to do with this, with this horrible woman and her horrific agenda.
Silver was innocent of it all, but one point:
She wanted to help me.
And she did. She found me and she saved my life. And then she kept on saving it, protecting me and keeping me together every step of the way...
I'm suddenly so angry.
She's so...so good.
And she's going to die.
Because of me.
Because that's the truth, isn't it?
I caused my mother to die.
And now Silver's life will be lost.
All because of my stupid heart and its fucking lock.
I didn't want this. I didn't want any of this. I wanted a normal life and I wanted it to be small. I wanted my mother to see me have kids one day with the right lady. I wanted her to watch them grow up. Life wasn't going to be without its problems: no life is.
But it was going to be small and good.
It was going to be my life.
And I know that Silver...
Silver was going to share it.
I'm sobbing quietly, great, wracking sobs that make my body curl forward in a spasm.
There's sorrow as I move, as I wrap my arms even tighter about Silver.
And, yes, there's pain, too. The agony in my middle grows with each passing heartbeat.
But, it's not what I concentrate on. It's distant, like it's not even a part of me.
This is the most of what I feel.
And it is this:
Fury.
Raw and pure and potent.
And it is growing inside of me.
Silver's taking her last breaths.
This is it.
These are the last moments I'm going to spend with this incredible creature.
With the woman I love.
Her smile, her mouth, her laughter, her blue eyes, her tangled curls, her hands with their long fingers, her jokes, her over protectiveness, her strength, her resilience, her hope, her naivety, her passion, her courage, her light...
All of it is going to sputter out.
The dark will devour that light.
Wild Hearts Page 20
